Glasgow is set to get another chain of Irish bars. As an Irishman, our Writer at Large is not impressed with yet more "cartoonisation" of his country and culture

There's sometimes a scene at the end of horror movies where the lead character seems to have escaped the demented fiend intent on killing them. A car stops to save them, or they run to an isolated house and beat on the door until it opens and they hide inside. They’re safe at last. The audience can breathe.

Invariably, though, the driver or the owner of the house is in cahoots with the fiend. Within seconds our lead is stabbed, sliced, shot or otherwise malkied to oblivion.

It’s the removal of hope which really twists the audience’s guts. The character they’re rooting for was so close to surviving, only for it all to be snatched away.

Now keep that reversal of fortune in mind, please, and let me tell you about the time I was meant to visit the only Scottish bar in St Petersburg. It was the mid-1990s and I was on a writing assignment to Russia. I thought I’d love it. I was mad about Russian culture – Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Mussorgsky, Tarkovsky.

It turned out to be the worst job I ever had, though. It wasn’t long after the fall of communism and the only growth industries that I could see were organised crime, homelessness and prostitution. Life was brutal and miserable. Society was chaotic and Darwinian. If you didn’t succeed – by using the bodies of the drowning as life rafts – you’d starve. Alcoholics were regularly found dead in the snow; children slept in the street. Bribery was endemic. I visited a women’s prison to write about conditions there and had to........

© Herald Scotland